A virtual machine is exhibiting these symptoms: -Memory usage is constantly high (94% or greater) or constantly low (24% or less). -Free memory is consistently 6% or less and swapping frequently occur

VMware Tools installs the balloon driver inside the guest OS, enabling the hypervisor to reclaim idle guest memory pages efficiently before falling back to slower host-level swapping, which directly reduces swap activity and improves performance.

If a memory reservation is set higher than the VM's actual active memory usage, it unnecessarily locks physical RAM and prevents ESXi from reclaiming it for other VMs - decreasing the reservation to match active usage allows ESXi to manage the memory pool more efficiently and reduces pressure that forces swapping.

Adding physical memory to the host expands the total available RAM, directly relieving the memory pressure that forces ESXi to use host-level swapping as a reclamation technique.

Disabling the balloon driver eliminates a key cooperative memory reclamation mechanism, forcing ESXi to escalate immediately to host-level swapping, which would worsen performance rather than improve it.

Setting a memory limit caps the maximum memory a VM can use and would force the VM to swap more aggressively if its workload requires memory beyond the imposed limit, exacerbating the problem.